November 2024 was a long month wedged between an unusually heavy election news cycle and the run-up to the holidays. The two cultural anchors that drove the month’s beauty conversation were Wicked’s theatrical opening on November 22 — which fully delivered on its long-trailed beauty marketing — and the holiday gift-set cycle running at full intensity from the first week through Black Friday. Underneath both, the prestige industry was navigating its biggest CEO transition in years (Estée Lauder’s Stéphane de La Faverie taking over from Fabrizio Freda on January 1, 2025), and the customer reaction at the counter was telling: more cautious spending, more interest in proven products, less appetite for novel launches at the prestige tier.
Wicked turned pink and green into a beauty palette
The Wicked theatrical release on November 22 delivered the most marketing-saturated beauty tie-in we’d seen all year. The lead-up had been seeded for months — Cynthia Erivo’s makeup looks, Ariana Grande’s Glinda-coded press tour beauty, the Mac Cosmetics x Wicked collaboration, and a half-dozen indie brands running their own pink-and-green capsules. The month-of release week itself was a kind of beauty content festival: tutorials, palette unboxings, the inevitable comparison-and-tier-list videos. The takeaway: studio-tied beauty collaborations had been hit-or-miss for a decade; the Wicked rollout was the most coherent example of doing it right that we’d seen since Black Panther in 2018.
Holiday gift sets did the heavy commercial lifting
The holiday gift-set cycle was the real revenue story of November. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk holiday sets continued as one of the most reliable gifting categories in beauty. Maybelline and the drugstore tier executed cleanly on stocking-stuffer sets. Victoria Beckham Beauty released a tighter-than-usual holiday capsule that sold through quickly. The interesting development was at the prestige tier: gift sets that included a full-size hero product and a deluxe sample of a newer launch outperformed sets of all minis. The takeaway: customers were using gift sets as a way to trial expensive products at a reasonable rationalization, and the brands that designed sets around that customer behavior won the season.
Tools and devices stepped back into prominence
The tools-and-devices category — hair dryers, hot brushes, multi-stylers — had been quietly building through 2024. By November the holiday gift list of beauty editors was loaded with them. The Dyson Airwrap and Supersonic continued as the aspirational ceiling. T3‘s AireLuxe dryer and the AireBrush rounded out the next tier. The wave of “Dyson alternatives” — Shark, Revlon, Drybar — gave the customer real choices at every price point. The takeaway: tools-and-devices was the category where gift-giver and gift-receiver expectations had aligned the best: high perceived value, real performance, and broad availability at every retailer.
Augustinus Bader and the cream wars
The luxury moisturizer category had been mostly settled for three years around Augustinus Bader The Rich Cream and La Mer’s Crème de la Mer at the top of the pyramid. November’s gifting cycle delivered a quiet up-move for Bader as the brand expanded distribution and ran heavy editorial. Armani Beauty‘s Crema Nera and a renewed interest in Crème de la Mer pulled back into competitive press. The takeaway: gift-season is when luxury skincare gets bought as a present-to-self in a way that doesn’t happen the rest of the year, and the brands that ran tighter holiday marketing won outsized share.
The prestige CEO transition shifted the conversation
Estée Lauder’s CEO transition — Stéphane de La Faverie announced as Fabrizio Freda’s successor effective January 1, 2025 — was the biggest leadership story in beauty in years. The October earnings call had set up the urgency; November’s investor commentary clarified the strategic priorities (back to fundamentals, China reset, prestige category discipline). The press conversation through November was unusually substantive: how does the largest US prestige beauty company recover its growth story, and what are the right moves on M&A, China, and Sephora wholesale. The takeaway: macro shifts at scale shape what brands launch and at what price for years after the announcement, and November was the month the prestige industry started planning its 2025 budget against the new reality.
What we are watching in December
December is year-in-review season, holiday party makeup, NYE looks, and the final wave of holiday gift-set sell-through. We’re watching for the Allure Best of Beauty + Beauty Inc. + WWD lists to see how much consensus there is in the year’s best products. We’re watching Wicked’s box office and beauty-tie-in long tail through the year-end weekends. And we’re watching for the new-year skincare reset content, which always starts the last week of December. We will see you on the first Tuesday of December.
Shop the edit
- Revlon One-Step Volumizer — the perennial holiday-gift hair tool.
- Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream — a gift-favorite body cream.
- Drunk Elephant Protini Cream — a prestige skincare gift.
- NYX Butter Gloss — a stocking-stuffer lip.
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